1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a data processing system. More specifically, the present invention provides a method, computer program product and data processing system for previewing electronic commerce content in a live electronic commerce environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computing technology has resulted in immensely complicated and ever-changing environments. One such environment is the Internet, which is also referred to as an “internetwork.” The Internet is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from a protocol of the sending network to a protocol used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “internet” refers to a collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols. Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, also called the “Web”.
The existence and continued acceptance and use of the Web and the Internet have resulted in many new and useful applications becoming available to users of the Internet. One useful and popular application is e-Commerce. E-Commerce has become a common part of everyday life. There have been a number of incidents in the industry where live e-Commerce sites were updated with incorrect pricing. While this has been favorable with the consuming public, it has caused immeasurable embarrassment for the e-Commerce merchants affected.
Today, most e-Commerce sites test their changes on a separate server before replicating these changes onto a production server. However, there are a number of circumstances where this may not be practical. For example, for small and medium sized business merchants, an extra server represents a significant expenditure and may use a large portion of the merchant's budget. However, previewing may be more vital to the small and medium sized business merchants than to large merchants, as a pricing error may prove to be more detrimental to the profits of small and medium sized merchants than to a large merchant.
Additionally, it may be easier to preview certain scenarios on a live site, than on a test server, such as promotions based on user data. A live server is a production environment server that an actual customer would access when shopping on that site. That is, a live server is the actual production server that the customer accesses when placing an actual order or browsing through actual content.
For example, a merchant may notice that there are some states whose markets they have not penetrated. The merchant may want to use a promotion to increase his/her presence in these markets by giving a 30% discount to all states where they have fewer than a thousand customers. This scenario can certainly be replicated on a test environment, but it is much easier, in terms of configuration and time, to preview this scenario on a live site.
Another scenario where it would be advantageous to test the system on a live server is where there are promotions based on specific dates. Business users, particularly catalog and marketing managers, may want to be able to preview their time-sensitive content updates in order to make sure they appear correctly. For marketing campaigns that are scheduled in advance, there needs to be ability for content providers to ensure that their future campaigns will operate as expected, short of modifying the system clock of their system.
Furthermore, business may desire to prevent customers from viewing experimental data on a production system. Typically this type of data must go through some approval flow before being published to customers of the site.
Based on these business requirements, it becomes necessary to preview the changes that a content provider makes on a production site before those changes are enabled for customers. Additionally, for usability, a content provider who is making content changes may find it desirable to simultaneously preview the changes as they would appear to a customer for whom the changes are targeted.